Activist’s video suggests Ferguson police have been lying about Mike Brown’s death

An activist claims that police in Ferguson, Missouri have deliberately misled the public about the distance between Darren Wilson’s department-issued SUV — where his confrontation with Michael Brown began — and the location of Brown’s body.

Police claimed — and the media repeatedly reported — that Brown was killed 35 feet from Wilson’s SUV, a distance at which police can reasonably be said to be in fear for their lives. But according to visual evidence from the day of the shooting and an on-site measurement based upon it, Shaun King contends that Brown was approximately 148 feet from the door of Wilson’s SUV when he died.

“The arc of their initial story, magnified in importance by the absence of even one official report, is that Darren Wilson shot and killed a young man who, in a short distance from the SUV, posed him grave harm,” King writes. “How far Mike Brown actually fled, how far Darren Wilson chased him, and where each of them were in relation to each other and to the SUV, are facts of paramount importance.”

Moreover, he continues, if “Brown fled over 100 feet away from Darren Wilson, it clearly suggests it Brown — unarmed, shot, missing a shoe, in lounge clothes — feared for his life and not the other way around.”

The longer distance between Wilson and Brown would account for one of the more inexplicable facts about the shooting, as King noted earlier this year on Twitter:

Several officers wrote me days after the Mike Brown murder, stumped, as to how Darren Wilson missed so many shots @ such a close range.

Wilson fired two shots at Brown while the two struggled near the SUV, then five more — none of which struck their target — as he fled. The distance between Wilson and Brown when those shots were fired is essential to establishing whether Wilson was justifiably in fear of his life.

Watch the video King posted in which he measured the distance from the fire hydrant in the crime scene photographs to the location of Brown’s body below.

About the Author

Scott Eric Kaufman is the proprietor of the AV Club's Internet Film School and, in addition to Raw Story, also writes for Lawyers, Guns & Money. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2008.